If, as Henry James said, the first duty of the novelist is to be interesting, he would be happy in St Aubyn’s company. Double Blind is emotionally cogent and intellectually fascinating. There are reflections and conversations here which adroitly evoke those important intersections where science and our urgent contemporary concerns meet. I was gripped by it.

Double Blind is a book of big ideas, in which the characters experiment with medicine, psychology, narcotics, religion and meditation to understand themselves and find peace. But as cerebral as the book is, it is also deeply felt, because St Aubyn has been thinking about these issues for decades

This is a novel with heart… Double Blind is both clever and compassionate, confirming St Aubyn as among the brightest lights of contemporary British literature

Shakespearean in scope and tone, moving from the intimate to the universal within paragraphs and providing tragedy, comedy and human frailty… A less practised author would run the risk of over-saturating all the disparate strands, but St Aubyn offers comment on the natural world, genetics, family dynamics, philosophy, psychiatry and ecology without forgetting the tapestry-like threads of the story itself-and provides a satisfying resolution to boot… Brimful of energy, this novel asks big questions-“How could one ever truly enter into another subjectivity?”-without giving us all the answers… Pacey, caustic and self-aware, it is this neatly choreographed dance of themes and ideas that makes for such absorbing and immediate reading.

Likeable and rounded characters and a celebration of the best things in life: the wilderness of Knepp and a touching but complex love story… St Aubyn’s reinvention as a writer is heroic and astonishing. He has emerged from the “very difficult truth” of this childhood to write brilliantly about that and, now, about a lot more.